My fear is that men in this position might abandon the mother and child, making their situation even worse.

Same. I was reading this like “how are you even asking that question? Of course the pro-lifers are going to be sticking to their guns!” There’s no doubt in my mind that this isn’t going to change anyone’s mind about abortion. Maybe a few, sure. But as far as Cruz, Huckabee, et al? They’ll probably dig in even deeper…

The book was more thoughtfully feminist and quite a bit darker than the movie, and the ending was rather different as well! Even though I do love me some Clive Owen, I definitely recommend the book. It was the first thing I thought of when I started hearing about Zika. I had flashbacks to scenes in the book where…

The Handmaid’s Tale is great. I JUST saw the movie of Children of Men for the first time right when the Zika virus crisis was hitting the news the other week, which makes this whole thing just terrifying. But now I’ll have to read the book, too.

I’ve heard that it’s one of the reasons American evangelicals claim that everyone is trying to persecute them even though they’re incredibly privileged... If suffering and persecution mean that God loves you, but you’re not suffering and you’re not persecuted, doesn’t that mean that God doesn’t love you?

Disregard the movie, but Children of Men the book is a really good one. That one at The Handmaid’s Tale were my favorite books growing up. I was ...a strange preteen

Agreed. Especially because even if the parents are spiritually lacking and it’s necessary to hasten their spiritual growth by putting them through an incredibly painful experience, WTF did the poor innocent baby do to deserve to be a means to that end?

People who say we should be grateful for suffering usually haven’t experienced much of it. They really should, they’d probably change their tune.

Jesus fucking Christ this is terrifying. My wife and I were wanting to have a baby in the next year or two and we live in Houston, a.k.a. The Bayou City. It will be impossible to avoid mosquitoes completely, and with us not exactly rolling in the dough, I don’t know how we would be able to handle something like this…

People who think that way clearly haven’t experienced enough pain. And I don’t say that because I wish them pain (although I do), I say that because they obviously don’t understand what actual human anguish feels like.

Well and men have to find someone who’ll carry their fetus/have children with them. So their reproduction relies heavily on someone else. I’ve always thought of the adamant anti-choice men as the type that NEED to force women to have their babies, because otherwise no one would.

Word. This author seems to have a lack of familiariaty with what cold motherfuckers the anti-choicers are. “Would you make a zika victim carry her baby to term?” “HELL YES” is what every last one of those assholes would say.

Plus the forced-birthers tend to focus on the single gal who uses abortion as birth control, rather than a married woman with kids who experiences a birth control failure while performing her wifely duties. That way they can rant against the circumstances of the conception rather than contemplate how they would feel…

repeat after me: correlation is not causation

This amazes me too, but some people genuinely think that the baby’s short and pain-filled life was God’s will and / or the baby deserved to experience life and love and / or was sent because the parents needed to learn some spiritual lesson.

It’s all about power. Women aren’t really independent and free people without reproductive freedom. They don’t want women to be free, but dependent on men and their own biology. It’s kind of like making a prisoner lame so they can’t run away as fast.

I think that the pro forced birth crowd just doesn’t care. They don’t think about the consequences of their rigid doctrinaire like attitude. They don’t think about the suffering of the mother, father or child. As long as the birth is forced, they are happy. People who actually think about real world life experiences…

Further proof The Universe/God/Fate has a twisted sense of humor: just as states are adding fetal abnormality provisions to the TRAP laws (barring women from deciding whether or not to continue a pregnancy that will not result in a healthy baby), mosquitos are coming to turn a bunch of planned pregnancies into…

A really close family friend of mine had a child with microcephaly, although the doctors did not call it that at the time and had little information about what could have caused it, saying, “It’s possible it was a virus.” The child was only able to live for 3 months, and it was a life that was mostly suffering. What…

I’m sure Mike Huckabee would have absolutely NO PROBLEM at all looking a Zika infected woman and denying her an abortion. He thinks 11 year old rape victims should have to carry their rapists baby to term as well.